true stories Craziest Ironic Deaths of All Time - Volume 1

Ironic deaths are the stuff of legend when it comes to the craziest deaths imaginable. For starters, the owner of the Segway died in a Segway accident and a Green Party candidate was killed by an SUV. Some of the most ironic deaths of recent memory have been gathered here on this ironic death list.

Ironic deaths are both easy and hard to define; unlike the Alanis Morissette song, there's a little more subtlety to calling a freaky death "ironic." Some of the most tragic deaths in history, however, were true cases of irony and life finding a way to turn death into something simultaneously funny and fascinating. These crazy deaths and stupid deaths feature stories of people who died in ways you might not expect.

Sure, a lot of funny deaths in history are extremely tragic and unfortunate, but very few are actually "ironic." Feel free to debate the irony of these freaky deaths and ironic passings and if you can't get enough of the craziest deaths ever reported, check out the list of most ironic deaths in history - volume 2.

In 1989, convicted murderer Michael Anderson Godwin - who originally was sentenced to death via the electric chair - caught a lucky break when his sentence was downgraded to a life sentence.

The universe decided the courts were wrong, so as the man was on his metal toilet (a fate horrible enough in and of itself) he tried to fix his a pair of headphones. And to prove exactly how great a decision-maker he was, he decided to bite down on a wire of his headphones while sitting on this metal toilet. This electrocuted him, using the wet metal toilet as a conductor, and the voltage killed him.

Honorable mention to Laurence Baker, also a convicted murderer, who (while serving a life sentence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) was electrocuted by his home made headphones ("No, I swear these are legit") while watching TV and sitting on a metal toilet.

Word to the wise, next time you're at a metal toilet either in prison or in a beach bathroom, do NOT watch television and do NOT touch ANY wires. Ever.

Psycho Body Double Killed In Shower

Photo: via Reddit

Myra Davis, whose professional acting name was Myra Jones, was involved in the production of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. She served as a stand-in for Janet Leigh, the woman who (spoiler alert for anyone who was born less than five years ago) was killed in the famous shower scene to the horrific, screechy strings.

In 1988, she was raped and killed by a man who was so obsessed with Psycho’s famous shower scene that he wanted to re-enact it upon Janet Leigh’s body double. Unfortunately for Myra Davis, the producers of the film had kept such a tight lip on how they shot the scene and which actresses they used that the information the killer gleaned over the years was skewed.

Davis never appeared in the shower scene. It was another actress, Marli Renfro, who served as Leigh’s body double and subsequently the body that audiences and the killer saw stab over and over again on the big screen. Not only was she killed in the same way someone was in the movie she was most famous for, but she wasn't even IN the scene the killer was trying to recreate.

Clement Vallandigham was a lawyer who represented a man charged with killing someone during a bar fight. Vallandigham’s approach was to convince the jury the dead man had shot himself as he drew his weapon from his pocket. As he faced the jury, Vallandigham recreated the situation exactly as it happened. And when I say exactly, I mean that he managed to also recreate the end result: a man shooting himself whilst drawing his pistol.

Vallandigham died from his injuries, but did manage to acquit his client on the grounds that a man can accidentally shot himself whilst drawing a weapon from his pocket by showing the jury exactly how this was done.

Mel Ignatow was tried and convicted for the murder of Brenda Sue Schafer in 1988 based on evidential photos that showed the woman being brutalized by an unidentified male. The moles on Ignatow's body provided a match to the man in the picture and became concrete evidence that he killed this woman.

He brutally beat her to death while he bound her to a GLASS coffee table, bludgeoning her body until it was lifeless on that glass coffee table. However, Ignatow got away with only ten years because of perjury and double jeopardy, whereas he would have served a life sentence otherwise.

Several years later, in a freak accident, he tripped and fell in his apartment... onto a glass coffee table. The coffee table's glass cut and maimed him so bad, that he lost too much blood for authorities to do anything about his situation. As he succumbed to the fatal cuts on his head and arms, his final thoughts must have been dominated by the fact that what killed him also killed his victim. The irony is, most likely, what killed him. see more on Mel Ignatow

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